Tag Archive | "SEO’s"

Organic and paid search aren’t always at odds; there are times when there’s benefit in knowing how they work together. Taking the time to know the ins and outs of AdWords can improve your rankings and on-site experience. In today’s edition of Whiteboard Friday, our fabulous guest host Dana DiTomaso explains how SEOs can improve their game by taking cues from paid search in this Whiteboard Friday.

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Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Dana DiTomaso. I’m President and Partner at Kick Point, and one of the things that we do at Kick Point is we do both SEO and paid. One of the things that’s really useful is when SEO and paid work together. But what’s even better is when SEOs can learn from paid to make their stuff better.

One of the things that is great about AdWords or Google Ads — whenever you’re watching this, it may be called one thing or the other — is that you can learn a lot from what has a high click-through rate, what performs well in paid, and paid is way faster than waiting for Google to catch up to the awesome title tags you’ve written or the new link building that you’ve done to see how it’s going to perform. So I’m going to talk about four things today that you can learn from AdWords, and really these are easy things to get into in AdWords.

Don’t be intimidated by the interface. You can probably just get in there and look at it yourself, or talk to your AdWords person. I bet they’d be really excited that you know what a callout extension is. So we’re going to start up here.

1. Negative keywords

The first thing is negative keywords. Negative keywords, obviously really important. You don’t want to show up for things that you shouldn’t be showing up for.

Often when we need to take over an AdWords account, there aren’t a lot of negative keywords. But if it’s a well-managed account, there are probably lots of negatives that have been added there over time. What you want to look at is if there’s poor word association. So in your industry, cheap, free, jobs, and then things like reviews and coupons, if these are really popular search phrases, then maybe this is something you need to create content for or you need to think about how your service is presented in your industry.

Then what you can do to change that is to see if there’s something different that you can do to present this kind of information. What are the kinds of things your business doesn’t want? Are you definitely not saying these things in the content of your website? Or is there a way that you can present the opposite opinion to what people might be searching for, for example? So think about that from a content perspective.

2. Title tags and meta descriptions

Then the next thing are title tags and meta descriptions. Title tags and meta descriptions should never be a write it once and forget it kind of thing. If you’re an on-it sort of SEO, you probably go in every once in a while and try to tweak those title tags and meta descriptions. But the problem is that sometimes there are just some that aren’t performing. So go into Google Search Console, find the title tags that have low click-through rate and high rankings, and then think about what you can do to test out new ones.

Then run an AdWords campaign and test out those title tags in the title of the ad. Test out new ad copy — that would be your meta descriptions — and see what actually brings a higher click-through rate. Then whichever one does, ta-da, that’s your new title tags and your meta descriptions. Then add those in and then watch your click-through rate increase or decrease.

Make sure to watch those rankings, because obviously title tag changes can have an impact on your rankings. But if it’s something that’s keyword rich, that’s great. I personally like playing with meta descriptions, because I feel like meta descriptions have a bigger impact on that click-through rate than title tags do, and it’s something really important to think about how are we making this unique so people want to click on us. The very best meta description I’ve ever seen in my life was for an SEO company, and they were ranking number one.

They were obviously very confident in this ranking, because it said, “The people above me paid. The people below me aren’t as good as me. Hire me for your SEO.” I’m like, “That’s a good meta description.” So what can you do to bring in especially that brand voice and your personality into those titles, into those meta descriptions and test it out with ads first and see what’s going to resonate with your audience. Don’t just think about click-through rate for these ads.

Make sure that you’re thinking about conversion rate. If you have a really long sales cycle, make sure those leads that you’re getting are good, because what you don’t want to have happen is have an ad that people click on like crazy, they convert like crazy, and then the customers are just a total trash fire. You really want to make sure you’re driving valuable business through this kind of testing. So this might be a bit more of a longer-term piece for you.

3. Word combinations

The third thing you can look at are word combinations.

So if you’re not super familiar with AdWords, you may not be familiar with the idea of broad match modifier. So in AdWords we have broad phrases that you can search for, recipes, for example, and then anything related to the word “recipe” will show up. But you could put in a phrase in quotes. You could say “chili recipes.” Then if they say, “I would like a chili recipe,” it would come up.

If it says “chili crockpot recipes,” it would not come up. Now if you had + chili + recipes, then anything with the phrase “chili recipes” would come up, which can be really useful. If you have a lot of different keyword combinations and you don’t have time for that, you can use broad match modifier to capture a lot of them. But then you have to have a good negative keyword list, speaking as an AdWords person for a second.

Now one of the things that can really come out of broad match modifier are a lot of great, new content ideas. If you look at the keywords that people had impressions from or clicks from as a result of these broad match modifier keywords, you can find the strangest phrasing that people come up with. There are lots of crazy things that people type into Google. We all know this, especially if it’s voice search and it’s obviously voice search.

One of the fun things to do is look and see if anybody has “okay Google” and then the search phrase, because they said “okay Google” twice and then Google searched “okay Google” plus the phrase. That’s always fun to pick up. But you can also pick up lots of different content ideas, and this can help you modify poorly performing content for example. Maybe you’re just not saying the thing in the way in which your audience is saying it.

AdWords gives you totally accurate data on what your customers are thinking and feeling and saying and searching. So why not use that kind of data? So definitely check out broad match modifier stuff and see what you can do to make that better.

4. Extensions

Then the fourth thing is extensions. So extensions are those little snippets that can show up under an ad.

You should always have all of the extensions loaded in, and then maybe Google picks some, maybe they won’t, but at least they’re there as an option. Now one thing that’s great are callout extensions. Those are the little site links that are like free trial, and people click on those, or find out more information or menu or whatever it might be. Now testing language in those callout extensions can help you with your call-to-action buttons.

Especially if you’re thinking about things like people want to download a white paper, well, what’s the best way to phrase that? What do you want to say for things like a submit button for your newsletter or for a contact form? Those little, tiny pieces, that are called micro-copy, what can you do by taking your highest performing callout extensions and then using those as your call-to-action copy on your website?

This is really going to improve your lead click-through rate. You’re going to improve the way people feel about you, and you’re going to have that really nice consistency between the language that you see in your advertising and the language that you have on your website, because one thing you really want to avoid as an SEO is to get into that silo where this is SEO and this is AdWords and the two of you aren’t talking to each other at all and the copy just feels completely disjointed between the paid side and the organic side.

It should all be working together. So by taking the time to understand AdWords a little bit, getting to know it, getting to know what you can do with it, and then using some of that information in your SEO work, you can improve your on-site experience as well as rankings, and your paid person is probably going to appreciate that you talked to them for a little bit.

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We rely pretty heavily on Google, but some of their decisions of late have made doing SEO more difficult than it used to be. Which organic opportunities have been taken away, and what are some potential solutions? Rand covers a rather unsettling trend for SEO in this week’s Whiteboard Friday.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking about something kind of unnerving. What do we, as SEOs, do as Google is removing organic search traffic?

So for the last 19 years or 20 years that Google has been around, every month Google has had, at least seasonally adjusted, not just more searches, but they’ve sent more organic traffic than they did that month last year. So this has been on a steady incline. There’s always been more opportunity in Google search until recently, and that is because of a bunch of moves, not that Google is losing market share, not that they’re receiving fewer searches, but that they are doing things that makes SEO a lot harder.

Some scary news

Things like…

Aggressive “answer” boxes. So you search for a question, and Google provides not just necessarily a featured snippet, which can earn you a click-through, but a box that truly answers the searcher’s question, that comes directly from Google themselves, or a set of card-style results that provides a list of all the things that the person might be looking for.

Google is moving into more and more aggressively commercial spaces, like jobs, flights, products, all of these kinds of searches where previously there was opportunity and now there’s a lot less. If you’re Expedia or you’re Travelocity or you’re Hotels.com or you’re Cheapflights and you see what’s going on with flight and hotel searches in particular, Google is essentially saying, “No, no, no. Don’t worry about clicking anything else. We’ve got the answers for you right here.”

We also saw for the first time a seasonally adjusted drop, a drop in total organic clicks sent. That was between August and November of 2017. It was thanks to the Jumpshot dataset. It happened at least here in the United States. We don’t know if it’s happened in other countries as well. But that’s certainly concerning because that is not something we’ve observed in the past. There were fewer clicks sent than there were previously. That makes us pretty concerned. It didn’t go down very much. It went down a couple of percentage points. There’s still a lot more clicks being sent in 2018 than there were in 2013. So it’s not like we’ve dipped below something, but concerning.

New zero-result SERPs. We absolutely saw those for the first time. Google rolled them back after rolling them out. But, for example, if you search for the time in London or a Lagavulin 16, Google was showing no results at all, just a little box with the time and then potentially some AdWords ads. So zero organic results, nothing for an SEO to even optimize for in there.

Local SERPs that remove almost all need for a website. Then local SERPs, which have been getting more and more aggressively tuned so that you never need to click the website, and, in fact, Google has made it harder and harder to find the website in both mobile and desktop versions of local searches. So if you search for Thai restaurant and you try and find the website of the Thai restaurant you’re interested in, as opposed to just information about them in Google’s local pack, that’s frustratingly difficult. They are making those more and more aggressive and putting them more forward in the results.

Potential solutions for marketers

So, as a result, I think search marketers really need to start thinking about: What do we do as Google is taking away this opportunity? How can we continue to compete and provide value for our clients and our companies? I think there are three big sort of paths — I won’t get into the details of the paths — but three big paths that we can pursue.

The first one is pretty powerful and pretty awesome, which is investing in demand generation, rather than just demand serving, but demand generation for brand and branded product names. Why does this work? Well, because let’s say, for example, I’m searching for SEO tools. What do I get? I get back a list of results from Google with a bunch of mostly articles saying these are the top SEO tools. In fact, Google has now made a little one box, card-style list result up at the top, the carousel that shows different brands of SEO tools. I don’t think Moz is actually listed in there because I think they’re pulling from the second or the third lists instead of the first one. Whatever the case, frustrating, hard to optimize for. Google could take away demand from it or click-through rate opportunity from it.

But if someone performs a search for Moz, well, guess what? I mean we can nail that sucker. We can definitely rank for that. Google is not going to take away our ability to rank for our own brand name. In fact, Google knows that, in the navigational search sense, they need to provide the website that the person is looking for front and center. So if we can create more demand for Moz than there is for SEO tools, which I think there’s something like 5 or 10 times more demand already for Moz than there is tools, according to Google Trends, that’s a great way to go. You can do the same thing through your content, through your social media, and through your email marketing. Even through search you can search and create demand for your brand rather than unbranded terms.

2. Optimize for additional platforms.

Second thing, optimizing across additional platforms. So we’ve looked and YouTube and Google Images account for about half of the overall volume that goes to Google web search. So between these two platforms, you’ve got a significant amount of additional traffic that you can optimize for. Images has actually gotten less aggressive. Right now they’ve taken away the “view image directly” link so that more people are visiting websites via Google Images. YouTube, obviously, this is a great place to build brand affinity, to build awareness, to create demand, this kind of demand generation to get your content in front of people. So these two are great platforms for that.

There are also significant amounts of web traffic still on the social web — LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc., etc. The list goes on. Those are places where you can optimize, put your content forward, and earn traffic back to your websites.

3. Optimize the content that Google does show.

Local

So if you’re in the local space and you’re saying, “Gosh, Google has really taken away the ability for my website to get the clicks that it used to get from Google local searches,” going into Google My Business and optimizing to provide information such that people who perform that query will be satisfied by Google’s result, yes, they won’t get to your website, but they will still come to your business, because you’ve optimized the content such that Google is showing, through Google My Business, such that those searchers want to engage with you. I think this sometimes gets lost in the SEO battle. We’re trying so hard to earn the click to our site that we’re forgetting that a lot of search experience ends right at the SERP itself, and we can optimize there too.

Results

In the zero-results sets, Google was still willing to show AdWords, which means if we have customer targets, we can use remarketed lists for search advertising (RLSA), or we can run paid ads and still optimize for those. We could also try and claim some of the data that might show up in zero-result SERPs. We don’t yet know what that will be after Google rolls it back out, but we’ll find out in the future.

Answers

For answers, the answers that Google is giving, whether that’s through voice or visually, those can be curated and crafted through featured snippets, through the card lists, and through the answer boxes. We have the opportunity again to influence, if not control, what Google is showing in those places, even when the search ends at the SERP.

All right, everyone, thanks for watching for this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We’ll see you again next week. Take care.

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Every other year, the good people at Moz conduct a survey with one goal in mind: understand what we (SEOs) want to read more of. If you haven’t seen the results from 2017, you can view them here.

The results contain many great questions, challenges, and roadblocks that SEOs face today. As I was reading the 2017 Moz Blog readership survey, a common thread stood out to me: there are disconnects on fundamental topics between SEOs and clients and/or bosses. Since I work at an agency, I’ll use “client” through the rest of this article; if you work in-house, replace that with “boss.”

Check out this list:

I can definitely relate to these challenges. I’ve been at Distilled for a few years now, and worked in other firms before — these challenges are real, and they’re tough. Through sharing my experience dealing with these challenges, I hope to help other consultants and SEOs to overcome them.

In particular, I want to discuss three points of disconnect that happen between SEOs and clients.

My client doesn’t understand how SEO works and I always have to justify my actions.

My client and I disagree about whether link building is the right answer.

Keep in mind, these are purely my own experiences. This doesn’t mean these answers are the end-all-be-all. In fact, I would enjoy starting a conversation around these challenges with any of you so please grab me at SearchLove (plug: our San Diego conference is selling out quickly and is my favorite) or MozCon to bounce off more ideas!

The value of SEO is its influence on organic search, which is extremely valuable. In fact, SEO is more prominent in 2018 than it has ever been. To illustrate this, I borrowed some figures from Rand’s write up on the state of organic search at the end of 2017.

Year over year, the period of January–October 2017 has 13% more search volume than the same months in 2016.

That 13% represents 54 billion more queries, which is just about the total number of searches Google did, worldwide, in 2003.

Organic search brings in the most qualified visitors (at a more consistent rate) than any other digital marketing channel. In other words, more people are searching for things than ever before, which results in more potential to grow organic traffic. How do we grow organic traffic? By making sure our sites are discoverable by Google and clearly answer user queries with good content.

When I first started out in SEO, I used to think I was making all my clients all the moneys. “Yes, Bill, if you hire me and we do this SEO thing I will increase rankings and sessions, and you will make an extra x dollars!” I used to send estimates on ROI with every single project I pitched (even if it wasn’t asked of me).

After a few years in the industry I began questioning the value of providing estimates on ROI. Specifically, I was having trouble determining ift I was doing the right thing by providing a number that was at best an educated guess. It would stress me out and I would feel like I was tied to that number. It also turns out, not worrying about things that are out of our control helps control stress levels.

I’m at a point now where I’ve realized the purpose of providing an estimated ROI. Our job as consultants is to effect change. We need to get people to take action. If what it takes to get sign-off is to predict an uplift, that’s totally fine. In fact, it’s expected. Here’s how that conversation might look.

Remember to think about seasonality, overall trends, and the fact that few brands exist in a vacuum. What are your competitors doing and how will that affect you?

2. My client doesn’t understand how SEO works and I always have to justify my actions

Does your client actually not understand how SEO works? Or, could it be that you don’t understand what they need from you? Perhaps you haven’t considered what they are struggling with at the moment?

I’ve been there — constantly needing to justify why you’re working on a project or why SEO should be a focus. It isn’t easy to be in this position. But, more often than not I’ve realized what helps the most is to take a step back and ask some fundamental questions.

A great place to start would be asking:

What are the things my client is concerned about?

What is my client being graded on by their boss?

Is my client under pressure for some reason?

The answers to these questions should shine some clarity on the situation (the why or the motivation behind the constant questioning). Some of the reasons why could be:

You might know more about SEO than your client, but they know more about their company. This means they may see the bigger picture between investments, returns, activities, and the interplay between them all.

SEO might be 20% of what your client needs to think about — imagine a VP of marketing who needs to account for 5–10 different channels.

If you didn’t get sign off/budget for a project, it doesn’t mean your request was without merit. This just means someone else made a better pitch more aligned to their larger goals.

When you have some answers, ask yourself, “How can I make what I’m doing align to what they’re focused on?” This will ensure you are hitting the nail on the head and providing useful insight instead of more confusion.

That conversation might look like this:

TL;DR

This is a good problem to have — it means you have a chance to effect change.

Also, it means that your client is interested in your work!

It’s important to clarify the why before getting to in the weeds. Rarely will the why be “to learn SEO.”

3. My client and I disagree about whether link building is the right answer

The topic of whether links (and by extension, link building) are important is perhaps the most talked about topic in SEO. To put it simply, there are many different opinions and not one “go-to” answer. In 2017 alone there have been many conflicting posts/talks on the state of links.

The quick answer to the challenge we face as SEOs when it comes to links is, unless authority is holding you back do something else.

That answer is a bit brief and if your client is constantly bringing up links, it doesn’t help. In this case, I think there are a few points to consider.

If you’re a small business, getting links is a legitimate challenge and can significantly impact your rankings. The problem is that it’s difficult to get links for a small business. Luckily, we have some experts in our field giving out ideas for this. Check out this, this, and this.

If you’re an established brand (with authority), links should not be a priority. Often, links will get prioritized because they are easier to attain, measurable (kind of), and comfortable. Don’t fall into this trap! Go with the recommendation above: do other impactful work that you have control over first.

Reasoning: Links tie success to a metric we have no control over — this gives us an excuse to not be accountable for success, which is bad.

Reasoning: Links reduce an extremely complicated situation into a single variable — this gives us an excuse not to try and understand everything (which is also bad).

It’s good to think about the topic of links and how it’s related to brand. Big brands get talked about (and linked to) more than small brands. Perhaps the focus should be “build your brand” instead of “gain some links”.

If your client persists on the topic of links, it might be easier to paint a realistic picture for them. This conversation might look like this:

TL;DR

There are many opinions on the state of links in 2018: don’t get distracted by all the noise.

If you’re a small business, there are some great tactics for building links that don’t take a ton of time and are probably worth it.

If you’re an established brand with more authority, do other impactful work that’s in your control first.

If you are constantly getting asked about links from your client, paint a realistic picture.

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, I’m really interested in hearing how you deal with these issues within your company. Are there specific challenges you face within the topics of ROI, educating on SEO, getting sign-off, or link building? How can we start tackling these problems more as an industry?

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Increasingly, social networks are tweaking their algorithms to favor content that remains on their site, rather than send users to an outside source. This spells trouble for those trying to drive traffic and visitors to external pages, but what’s an SEO or content marketer to do? Do you swim with the current, putting all your efforts toward placating the social network algos, or do you go against it and continue to promote your own content? This edition of Whiteboard Friday goes into detail on the pros and cons of each approach, then gives Rand’s recommendations on how to balance your efforts going forward.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about whether SEOs and content marketers, for that matter, should play to what the social networks are developing in their visibility and engagement algorithms, or whether we should say, “No. You know what? Forget about what you guys are doing. We’re going to try and do things on social networks that benefit us.” I’ll show you what I’m talking about.

Facebook

If you’re using Facebook and you’re posting content to it, Facebook generally tends to frown upon and lower the average visibility and ability of content to reach its audience on Facebook if it includes an external link. So, on average, posts that include an external link will fare more poorly in Facebooks’ news feed algorithm than on-site content, exclusively content that lives on Facebook.

For example, if you see this video promoted on Facebook.com/Moz or Facebook.com/RandFishkin, it will do more poorly than if Moz and I had promoted a Facebook native video of Whiteboard Friday. But we don’t want that. We want people to come visit our site and subscribe to Whiteboard Friday here and not stay on Facebook where we only reach 1 out of every 50 or 100 people who might subscribe to our page.

So it’s clearly in our interest to do this, but Facebook wants to keep you on Facebook’s website, because then they can do the most advertising and targeting to you and get the most time on site from you. That’s their business, right?

Twitter

The same thing is true of Twitter. So it tends to be the case that links off Twitter fare more poorly. Now, I am not 100% sure in Twitter’s case whether this is algorithmic or user-driven. I suspect it’s a little of both, that Twitter will promote or make most visible to you when you log in to Twitter the posts that have been made or the tweets that have been made that are self-contained. They live entirely on Twitter. They might contain a bunch of different stuff, a poll or images or be a thread. But links off Twitter will be dampened.

Instagram

The same thing is true on Instagram. Well, on Instagram, they’re kind of the worst. They don’t allow links at all. The only thing you can do is a link in profile. More engaging content on Instagram, as of just a couple weeks ago, more engaging content equals higher placement in the feed. In fact, Instagram has now just come out and said that they will show you content posts from people you’re not following but that they think will be engaging to you, which gives influential Instagram accounts that get lots of engagement an additional benefit, but kind of hurts everyone else that you’re normally following on the network.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn, LinkedIn’s algorithm includes extra visibility in the feed for self-contained post content, which is why you see a lot of these posts of, “Oh, here’s all the crazy amounts of work I did and what my experience was like building this or doing that.” If it’s a self-contained, sort of blog post-style content in LinkedIn that does not link out, it will do much better than posts that contain an external link, which LinkedIn sort of dampens in their visibility algorithm for their feed.

Play to the algos?

So all of these sites have these components of their algorithm that basically reward you if you are willing to play to their algos, meaning you keep all of the content on their sites and platform, their stuff, not yours. You essentially play to what they’re trying to achieve, which is more time on site for them, more engagement for them, less people going away to other places. You refuse or you don’t link out, so no external linking to other places. You maintain sort of what I call a high signal to noise ratio, so that rather than sharing all the things you might want to share, you only share posts that you can count on having relatively high engagement.

That track record is something that sticks with you on most of these networks. Facebook, for example, if I have posts that do well, many in a row, I will get more visibility for my next one. If my last couple of posts have performed poorly on Facebook, my next one will be dampened. You sort of get a string or get on a roll with these networks. Same thing is true on Twitter, by the way.

$ #@! the algos, serve your own site?

Or you say, “Forget you” to the algorithms and serve your own site instead, which means you use the networks to tease content, like, “Here’s this exciting, interesting thing. If you want the whole story or you want to watch full video or see all the graphs and charts or whatever it is, you need to come to our website where we host the full content.” You link externally so that you’re driving traffic back to the properties that you own and control, and you have to be willing to promote some potentially promotional content, in order to earn value from these social networks, even if that means slightly lower engagement or less of that get-on-a-roll reputation.

My recommendation

The recommendation that I have for SEOs and content marketers is I think we need to balance this. But if I had to, I would tilt it in favor of your site. Social networks, I know it doesn’t seem this way, but social networks come and go in popularity, and they change the way that they work. So investing very heavily in Facebook six or seven years ago might have made a ton of sense for a business. Today, a lot of those investments have been shown to have very little impact, because instead of reaching 20 or 30 out of 100 of your followers, you’re reaching 1 or 2. So you’ve lost an order of magnitude of reach on there. The same thing has been true generally on Twitter, on LinkedIn, and on Instagram. So I really urge you to tilt slightly to your own site.

Owned channels are your website, your email, where you have the email addresses of the people there. I would rather have an email or a loyal visitor or an RSS subscriber than I would 100 times as many Twitter followers, because the engagement you can get and the value that you can get as a business or as an organization is just much higher.

Just don’t ignore how these algorithms work. If you can, I would urge you to sometimes get on those rolls so that you can grow your awareness and reach by playing to these algorithms.

So, essentially, while I’m urging you to tilt slightly this way, I’m also suggesting that occasionally you should use what you know about how these algorithms work in order to grow and accelerate your growth of followers and reach on these networks so that you can then get more benefit of driving those people back to your site. You’ve got to play both sides, I think, today in order to have success with the social networks’ current reach and visibility algorithms.

All right, everyone, look forward to your comments. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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This survey and its analysis was co-authored with North Star Inbound’s senior creative strategist, Andrea Pretorian.

In the spring of 2017, North Star Inbound partnered up with seoClarity and BuzzStream to survey the state of enterprise SEO. We had a fair share of anecdotal evidence from our clients, but we wanted a more objective measurement of how SEO teams are assembled, what resources are allocated to them, what methods they use, and how they perform.

We hadn’t seen such data collected, particularly for enterprise SEO. We found this surprising given its significance, evident even in the number of “enterprise SEO tools” and solutions being marketed.

What is enterprise SEO?

There is no single fixed-industry definition of “enterprise” beyond “large business.” For the purposes of this survey, we defined enterprise businesses as being comprised of 500 or more employees. “Small enterprise” means 500–1000 employees, while “large enterprise” means over 1000 employees.

Industry discussion often points to the number of pages as being a potential defining factor for enterprise SEO, but even that is not necessarily a reliable measure.

What was our survey methodology?

We developed the widest enterprise SEO survey to date, made up of 29 questions that delved into every aspect of the enterprise SEO practice. From tools and tactics to content development, keyword strategy, and more, we left no stone unturned. We then picked the brains of 240 SEO specialists across the country. You can check out our complete survey, methodology, and results here.

Team size matters — or does it?

Let’s start by looking at enterprise team size and the resources allocated to them. We focused on companies with an in-house SEO team, and broke them down in terms of small (500–1000 employees) and large enterprise (>1000 employees).

We found that 76% of small enterprise companies have in-house SEO teams of 5 people or less, but were surprised that 68% of large enterprise companies also had teams of this size. We expected a more pronounced shift into larger team sizes paralleling the larger size of their parent company; we did not expect to see roughly the same team size across small and large enterprise companies.

Interestingly, in larger companies we also see less confidence in the team’s experience in SEO. Of the companies with in-house SEO, only 31.67% of large enterprise teams called themselves “leaders” in the SEO space, which was defined in this survey as part of a team engaged broadly and critically within the business. 40% of small enterprise teams called themselves “leaders.” In terms of viewing themselves more positively (leaders, visionaries) or less (SEO pioneers in their company or else new SEO teams), we did not notice a big difference between small or large enterprise in-house SEO teams.

Large enterprise companies should have more resources at their disposal — HR teams to hire the best talent, reliable onboarding practices in place, access to more sophisticated project management tools, and more experience managing teams — which makes these results surprising. Why are large enterprise companies not more confident about their SEO skills and experience?

Before going too far in making assumptions about their increased resources, we made sure to ask our survey-takers about this. Specifically, we asked for how much budget is allocated to SEO activity per month — not including the cost of employees’ salaries, or the overhead costs of keeping the lights on — since this would result in a figure easier to report consistently across all survey takers.

It turns out that 57% of large enterprise companies had over $ 10K dedicated strictly to SEO activity each month, in contrast to just 24% of small enterprise companies allocating this much budget. 40% of large enterprise had over $ 20K dedicated to SEO activity each month, suggesting that SEO is a huge priority for them. And yet, as we saw earlier, they are not sold on their team having reached leader status.

Enterprise SEO managers in large companies value being scalable and repeatable

We asked survey takers to rate the success of their current SEO strategy, per the scale mapped below, and here are the results:

A smaller percentage of large enterprise SEOs had a clearly positive rating of the current success of their SEO strategy than did small enterprise SEOs. We even see more large enterprise SEOs “on the fence” about their strategy’s performance as opposed to small. This suggests that, from the enterprise SEOs we surveyed, the ones who work for smaller companies tend to be slightly more optimistic about their campaigns’ performance than the larger ones.

What’s notable about the responses to this question is that 18.33% of managers at large enterprise companies would rate themselves as successful — calling themselves “scalable and repeatable.” No one at a small enterprise selected this to describe their strategy. We clearly tapped into an important value for these teams, who use it enough to measure their performance that it’s a value they can report on to others as a benchmark of their success.

Anyone seeking to work with large enterprise clients needs to make sure their processes are scalable and repeatable. This also suggests that one way for a growing company to step up its SEO team’s game as it grows is by achieving these results. This would be a good topic for us to address in greater detail in articles, webinars, and other industry communication.

Agencies know best? (Agencies think they know best.)

Regardless of the resources available to them, across the board we see that in-house SEOs do not show as much confidence as agencies. Agencies are far more likely to rate their SEO strategy as successful: 43% of survey takers who worked for agencies rated their strategy as outright successful, as opposed to only 13% of in-house SEOs. That’s huge!

While nobody said their strategy was a total disaster — we clearly keep awesome company — 7% of in-house SEOs expressed frustration with their strategy, as opposed to only 1% of agencies.

Putting our bias as a link building agency aside, we would expect in-house SEO enterprise teams to work like in-house agencies. With the ability to hire top talent and purchase enterprise software solutions to automate and track campaigns, we expect them to have the appropriate tools and resources at their disposal to generate the same results and confidence as any agency.

So why the discrepancy? It’s hard to say for sure. One theory might be that those scalable, repeatable results we found earlier that serve as benchmarks for enterprise are difficult to attain, but the way agencies evolve might serve them better. Agencies tend to develop somewhat organically — expanding their processes over time and focusing on SEO from day one — as opposed to an in-house team in a company, which rarely was there from day one and, more often than not, sprouted up when the company’s growth made it such that marketing became a priority.

One clue for answering this question might come from examining the differences between how agencies and in-house SEO teams responded to the question asking them what they find to be the top two most difficult SEO obstacles they are currently facing.

If we look at the top three obstacles faced by agencies and in-house teams, both of them place finding SEO talent up there. Both groups also say that demonstrating ROI is an issue, although it’s more of an obstacle for agencies rather than in-house SEO teams.

When we look at the third obstacles, we find the biggest reveal. While agencies find themselves hindered by trying to secure enough budget, in-house SEO teams struggle to develop the right content; this seems in line with the point we made in the previous section comparing agency versus in-house success. Agencies have the processes down, but need to work hard to fit their clients’ budgets. In-house teams have the budget they need, but have trouble lining them up to the exact processes their company needs to grow as desired. The fact that almost half of the in-house SEOs would rank developing the right content as their biggest obstacle — as opposed to just over a quarter of agencies — further supports this, particularly given how important content is to any marketing campaign.

Now, let’s take a step back and dig deeper into that second obstacle we noted: demonstrating ROI.

Everyone seems to be measuring success differently

One question that we asked of survey takers was about the top two technical SEO issues they monitor:

The spread across the different factors were roughly the same across the two different groups. The most notable difference between the two groups was that even more in-house SEO teams looked at page speed, although this was the top factor for both groups. Indexation was the second biggest factor for both groups, followed by duplicate content. There seems to be some general consensus about monitoring technical SEO issues.

But when we asked everyone what their top two factors are when reviewing their rankings, we got these results:

For both agencies and in-house SEO teams, national-level keywords were the top factor, although this was true for almost-three quarters of in-house SEOs and about half of agencies. Interestingly, agencies focused a bit more on geo/local keywords as well as mobile. From when we first opened this data we found this striking, because it suggests a narrative where in-house SEO teams focus on more conservative, “seasoned” methods, while agencies are more likely to stay on the cutting-edge.

Looking at the “Other” responses (free response), we had several write-ins from both subgroups who answered that traffic and leads were important to them. One agency survey-taker brought up a good point: that what they monitor “differs by client.” We would be remiss if we did not mention the importance of vertical-specific and client-specific approaches — even if you are working in-house, and your only client is your company. From this angle, it makes sense that everyone is measuring rankings and SEO differently.

However, we would like to see a bit more clarity within the community on setting these parameters, and we hope that these results will foster that sort of discussion. Please do feel free to reply in the comments:

How do you measure ROI on your SEO efforts?

How do you show your campaigns’ value?

What would you change about how you’re currently measuring the success of your efforts?

So what’s next?

We’d love to hear about your experiences, in-house or agency, and how you’ve been able to demonstrate ROI on your campaigns.

We’re going to repeat this survey again next year, so stay tuned. We hope to survey a larger audience so that we can break down the groups we examine further and analyze response trends among the resulting subgroups. We wanted to do this here in this round of analysis, but were hesitant because of how small the resulting sample size would be.

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Entertain the idea, for a moment, that Google assigned a quality score to organic search results. Say it was based off of click data and engagement metrics, and that it would function in a similar way to the Google AdWords quality score. How exactly might such a score work, what would it be based off of, and how could you optimize for it?

While there’s no hard proof it exists, the organic quality score is a concept that’s been pondered by many SEOs over the years. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand examines this theory inside and out, then offers some advice on how one might boost such a score.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about organic quality score.

So this is a concept. This is not a real thing that we know Google definitely has. But there’s this concept that SEOs have been feeling for a long time, that similar to what Google has in their AdWords program with a paid quality score, where a page has a certain score assigned to it, that on the organic side Google almost definitely has something similar. I’ll give you an example of how that might work.

So, for example, if on my site.com I have these three — this is a very simplistic website — but I have these three subfolders: Products, Blog, and About. I might have a page in my products, 14axq.html, and it has certain metrics that Google associates with it through activity that they’ve seen from browser data, from clickstream data, from search data, and from visit data from the searches and bounces back to the search results, and all these kinds of things, all the engagement and click data that we’ve been talking about a lot this year on Whiteboard Friday.

So they may have these metrics, pogo stick rate and bounce rate and a deep click rate (the rate with which someone clicks to the site and then goes further in from that page), the time that they spend on the site on average, the direct navigations that people make to it each month through their browsers, the search impressions and search clicks, perhaps a bunch of other statistics, like whether people search directly for this URL, whether they perform branded searches. What rate do unique devices in one area versus another area do this with? Is there a bias based on geography or device type or personalization or all these kinds of things?

But regardless of that, you get this idea that Google has this sort of sense of how the page performs in their search results. That might be very different across different pages and obviously very different across different sites. So maybe this blog post over here on /blog is doing much, much better in all these metrics and has a much higher quality score as a result.

Current SEO theories about organic quality scoring:

Now, when we talk to SEOs, and I spend a lot of time talking to my fellow SEOs about theories around this, a few things emerge. I think most folks are generally of the opinion that if there is something like an organic quality score…

1. It is probably based on this type of data — queries, clicks, engagements, visit data of some kind.

We don’t doubt for a minute that Google has much more sophistication than the super-simplified stuff that I’m showing you here. I think Google publicly denies a lot of single types of metric like, “No, we don’t use time on site. Time on site could be very variable, and sometimes low time on site is actually a good thing.” Fine. But there’s something in there, right? They use some more sophisticated format of that.

2. We also are pretty sure that this is applying on three different levels:

This is an observation from experimentation as well as from Google statements which is…

Domain-wide, so that would be across one domain, if there are many pages with high quality scores, Google might view that domain differently from a domain with a variety of quality scores on it or one with generally low ones.

Same thing for a subdomain. So it could be that a subdomain is looked at differently than the main domain, or that two different subdomains may be viewed differently. If content appears to have high quality scores on this one, but not on this one, Google might generally not pass all the ranking signals or give the same weight to the quality scores over here or to the subdomain over here.

Same thing is true with subfolders, although to a lesser extent. In fact, this is kind of in descending order. So you can generally surmise that Google will pass these more across subfolders than they will across subdomains and more across subdomains than across root domains.

3. A higher density of good scores to bad ones can mean a bunch of good things:

More rankings in visibility even without other signals. So even if a page is sort of lacking in these other quality signals, if it is in this blog section, this blog section tends to have high quality scores for all the pages, Google might give that page an opportunity to rank well that it wouldn’t ordinarily for a page with those ranking signals in another subfolder or on another subdomain or on another website entirely.

Some sort of what we might call “benefit of the doubt”-type of boost, even for new pages. So a new page is produced. It doesn’t yet have any quality signals associated with it, but it does particularly well.

As an example, within a few minutes of this Whiteboard Friday being published on Moz’s website, which is usually late Thursday night or very early Friday morning, at least Pacific time, I will bet that you can search for “Google organic quality score” or even just “organic quality score” in Google’s engine, and this Whiteboard Friday will perform very well. One of the reasons that probably is, is because many other Whiteboard Friday videos, which are in this same subfolder, Google has seen them perform very well in the search results. They have whatever you want to call it — great metrics, a high organic quality score — and because of that, this Whiteboard Friday that you’re watching right now, the URL that you see in the bar up above is almost definitely going to be ranking well, possibly in that number one position, even though it’s brand new. It hasn’t yet earned the quality signals, but Google assumes, it gives it the benefit of the doubt because of where it is.

We surmise that there’s also more value that gets passed from links, both internal and external, from pages with high quality scores. That is right now a guess, but something we hope to validate more, because we’ve seen some signs and some testing that that’s the case.

3 ways to boost your organic quality score

If this is true — and it’s up to you whether you want to believe that it is or not — even if you don’t believe it, you’ve almost certainly seen signs that something like it’s going on. I would urge you to do these three things to boost your organic quality score or whatever you believe is causing these same elements.

1. You could add more high-performing pages. So if you know that pages perform well and you know what those look like versus ones that perform poorly, you can make more good ones.

2. You can improve the quality score of existing pages. So if this one is kind of low, you’re seeing that these engagement and use metrics, the SERP click-through rate metrics, the bounce rate metrics from organic search visits, all of these don’t look so good in comparison to your other stuff, you can boost it, improve the content, improve the navigation, improve the usability and the user experience of the page, the load time, the visuals, whatever you’ve got there to hold searchers’ attention longer, to keep them engaged, and to make sure that you’re solving their problem. When you do that, you will get higher quality scores.

3. Remove low-performing pages through a variety of means. You could take a low-performing page and you might say, “Hey, I’m going to redirect that to this other page, which does a better job answering the query anyway.” Or, “Hey, I’m going to 404 that page. I don’t need it anymore. In fact, no one needs it anymore.” Or, “I’m going to no index it. Some people may need it, maybe the ones who are visitors to my website, who need it for some particular direct navigation purpose or internal purpose. But Google doesn’t need to see it. Searchers don’t need it. I’m going to use the no index, either in the meta robots tag or in the robots.txt file.”

One thing that’s really interesting to note is we’ve seen a bunch of case studies, especially since MozCon, when Britney Muller, Moz’s Head of SEO, shared the fact that she had done some great testing around removing tens of thousands of low-quality, really low-quality performing pages from Moz’s own website and seen our rankings and our traffic for the remainder of our content go up quite significantly, even controlling for seasonality and other things.

That was pretty exciting. When we shared that, we got a bunch of other people from the audience and on Twitter saying, “I did the same thing. When I removed low-performing pages, the rest of my site performed better,” which really strongly suggests that there’s something like a system in this fashion that works in this way.

So I’d urge you to go look at your metrics, go find pages that are not performing well, see what you can do about improving them or removing them, see what you can do about adding new ones that are high organic quality score, and let me know your thoughts on this in the comments.

We’ll look forward to seeing you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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Internal links are one of those essential SEO items you have to get right to avoid getting them really wrong. Rand shares 18 tips to help inform your strategy, going into detail about their attributes, internal vs. external links, ideal link structures, and much, much more in this edition of Whiteboard Friday.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat a little bit about internal links and internal link structures. Now, it is not the most exciting thing in the SEO world, but it’s something that you have to get right and getting it wrong can actually cause lots of problems.

Attributes of internal links

So let’s start by talking about some of the things that are true about internal links. Internal links, when I say that phrase, what I mean is a link that exists on a website, let’s say ABC.com here, that is linking to a page on the same website, so over here, linking to another page on ABC.com. We’ll do /A and /B. This is actually my shipping routes page. So you can see I’m linking from A to B with the anchor text “shipping routes.”

The idea of an internal link is really initially to drive visitors from one place to another, to show them where they need to go to navigate from one spot on your site to another spot. They’re different from internal links only in that, in the HTML code, you’re pointing to the same fundamental root domain. In the initial early versions of the internet, that didn’t matter all that much, but for SEO, it matters quite a bit because external links are treated very differently from internal links. That is not to say, however, that internal links have no power or no ability to change rankings, to change crawling patterns and to change how a search engine views your site. That’s what we need to chat about.

1. Anchor text is something that can be considered. The search engines have generally minimized its importance, but it’s certainly something that’s in there for internal links.

2. The location on the page actually matters quite a bit, just as it does with external links. Internal links, it’s almost more so in that navigation and footers specifically have attributes around internal links that can be problematic.

Those are essentially when Google in particular sees manipulation in the internal link structure, specifically things like you’ve stuffed anchor text into all of the internal links trying to get this shipping routes page ranking by putting a little link down here in the footer of every single page and then pointing over here trying to game and manipulate us, they hate that. In fact, there is an algorithmic penalty for that kind of stuff, and we can see it very directly.

We’ve actually run tests where we’ve observed that jamming this type of anchor text-rich links into footers or into navigation and then removing it gets a site indexed, well let’s not say indexed, let’s say ranking well and then ranking poorly when you do it. Google reverses that penalty pretty quickly too, which is nice. So if you are not ranking well and you’re like, “Oh no, Rand, I’ve been doing a lot of that,” maybe take it away. Your rankings might come right back. That’s great.

3. The link target matters obviously from one place to another.

4. The importance of the linking page, this is actually a big one with internal links. So it is generally the case that if a page on your website has lots of external links pointing to it, it gains authority and it has more ability to sort of generate a little bit, not nearly as much as external links, but a little bit of ranking power and influence by linking to other pages. So if you have very well-linked two pages on your site, you should make sure to link out from those to pages on your site that a) need it and b) are actually useful for your users. That’s another signal we’ll talk about.

5. The relevance of the link, so pointing to my shipping routes page from a page about other types of shipping information, totally great. Pointing to it from my dog food page, well, it doesn’t make great sense. Unless I’m talking about shipping routes of dog food specifically, it seems like it’s lacking some of that context, and search engines can pick up on that as well.

6. The first link on the page. So this matters mostly in terms of the anchor text, just as it does for external links. Basically, if you are linking in a bunch of different places to this page from this one, Google will usually, at least in all of our experiments so far, count the first anchor text only. So if I have six different links to this and the first link says “Click here,” “Click here” is the anchor text that Google is going to apply, not “Click here” and “shipping routes” and “shipping.” Those subsequent links won’t matter as much.

7. Then the type of link matters too. Obviously, I would recommend that you keep it in the HTML link format rather than trying to do something fancy with JavaScript. Even though Google can technically follow those, it looks to us like they’re not treated with quite the same authority and ranking influence. Text is slightly, slightly better than images in our testing, although that testing is a few years old at this point. So maybe image links are treated exactly the same. Either way, do make sure you have that. If you’re doing image links, by the way, remember that the alt attribute of that image is what becomes the anchor text of that link.

Internal versus external links

A. External links usually give more authority and ranking ability.

That shouldn’t be surprising. An external link is like a vote from an independent, hopefully independent, hopefully editorially given website to your website saying, “This is a good place for you to go for this type of information.” On your own site, it’s like a vote for yourself, so engines don’t treat it the same.

B. Anchor text of internal links generally have less influence.

So, as we mentioned, me pointing to my page with the phrase that I want to rank for isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I shouldn’t do it in a manipulative way. I shouldn’t do it in a way that’s going to look spammy or sketchy to visitors, because if visitors stop clicking around my site or engaging with it or they bounce more, I will definitely lose ranking influence much faster than if I simply make those links credible and usable and useful to visitors. Besides, the anchor text of internal links is not as powerful anyway.

C. A lack of internal links can seriously hamper a page’s ability to get crawled + ranked.

It is, however, the case that a lack of internal links, like an orphan page that doesn’t have many internal or any internal links from the rest of its website, that can really hamper a page’s ability to rank. Sometimes it will happen. External links will point to a page. You’ll see that page in your analytics or in a report about your links from Moz or Ahrefs or Majestic, and then you go, “Oh my gosh, I’m not linking to that page at all from anywhere else on my site.” That’s a bad idea. Don’t do that. That is definitely problematic.

D. It’s still the case, by the way, that, broadly speaking, pages with more links on them will send less link value per link.

So, essentially, you remember the original PageRank formula from Google. It said basically like, “Oh, well, if there are five links, send one-fifth of the PageRank power to each of those, and if there are four links, send one-fourth.” Obviously, one-fourth is bigger than one-fifth. So taking away that fifth link could mean that each of the four pages that you’ve linked to get a little bit more ranking authority and influence in the original PageRank algorithm.

Look, PageRank is old, very, very old at this point, but at least the theories behind it are not completely gone. So it is the case that if you have a page with tons and tons of links on it, that tends to send out less authority and influence than a page with few links on it, which is why it can definitely pay to do some spring cleaning on your website and clear out any rubbish pages or rubbish links, ones that visitors don’t want, that search engines don’t want, that you don’t care about. Clearing that up can actually have a positive influence. We’ve seen that on a number of websites where they’ve cleaned up their information architecture, whittled down their links to just the stuff that matters the most and the pages that matter the most, and then seen increased rankings across the board from all sorts of signals, positive signals, user engagement signals, link signals, context signals that help the engine them rank better.

E. Internal link flow (aka PR sculpting) is rarely effective, and usually has only mild effects… BUT a little of the right internal linking can go a long way.

Then finally, I do want to point out that what was previous called — you probably have heard of it in the SEO world — PageRank sculpting. This was a practice that I’d say from maybe 2003, 2002 to about 2008, 2009, had this life where there would be panel discussions about PageRank sculpting and all these examples of how to do it and software that would crawl your site and show you the ideal PageRank sculpting system to use and which pages to link to and not.

When PageRank was the dominant algorithm inside of Google’s ranking system, yeah, it was the case that PageRank sculpting could have some real effect. These days, that is dramatically reduced. It’s not entirely gone because of some of these other principles that we’ve talked about, just having lots of links on a page for no particularly good reason is generally bad and can have harmful effects and having few carefully chosen ones has good effects. But most of the time, internal linking, optimizing internal linking beyond a certain point is not very valuable, not a great value add.

But a little of what I’m calling the right internal linking, that’s what we’re going to talk about, can go a long way. For example, if you have those orphan pages or pages that are clearly the next step in a process or that users want and they cannot find them or engines can’t find them through the link structure, it’s bad. Fixing that can have a positive impact.

Ideal internal link structures

So ideally, in an internal linking structure system, you want something kind of like this. This is a very rough illustration here. But the homepage, which has maybe 100 links on it to internal pages. One hop away from that, you’ve got your 100 different pages of whatever it is, subcategories or category pages, places that can get folks deeper into your website. Then from there, each of those have maybe a maximum of 100 unique links, and they get you 2 hops away from a homepage, which takes you to 10,000 pages who do the same thing.

I. No page should be more than 3 link “hops” away from another (on most small–>medium sites).

Now, the idea behind this is that basically in one, two, three hops, three links away from the homepage and three links away from any page on the site, I can get to up to a million pages. So when you talk about, “How many clicks do I have to get? How far away is this in terms of link distance from any other page on the site?” a great internal linking structure should be able to get you there in three or fewer link hops. If it’s a lot more, you might have an internal linking structure that’s really creating sort of these long pathways of forcing you to click before you can ever reach something, and that is not ideal, which is why it can make very good sense to build smart categories and subcategories to help people get in there.

I’ll give you the most basic example in the world, a traditional blog. In order to reach any post that was published two years ago, I’ve got to click Next, Next, Next, Next, Next, Next through all this pagination until I finally get there. Or if I’ve done a really good job with my categories and my subcategories, I can click on the category of that blog post and I can find it very quickly in a list of the last 50 blog posts in that particular category, great, or by author or by tag, however you’re doing your navigation.

II.Pages should contain links that visitors will find relevant and useful.

If no one ever clicks on a link, that is a bad signal for your site, and it is a bad signal for Google as well. I don’t just mean no one ever. Very, very few people ever and many of them who do click it click the back button because it wasn’t what they wanted. That’s also a bad sign.

III. Just as no two pages should be targeting the same keyword or searcher intent, likewise no two links should be using the same anchor text to point to different pages. Canonicalize!

For example, if over here I had a shipping routes link that pointed to this page and then another shipping routes link, same anchor text pointing to a separate page, page C, why am I doing that? Why am I creating competition between my own two pages? Why am I having two things that serve the same function or at least to visitors would appear to serve the same function and search engines too? I should canonicalize those. Canonicalize those links, canonicalize those pages. If a page is serving the same intent and keywords, keep it together.

IV. Limit use of the rel=”nofollow” to UGC or specific untrusted external links. It won’t help your internal link flow efforts for SEO.

Rel=”nofollow” was sort of the classic way that people had been doing PageRank sculpting that we talked about earlier here. I would strongly recommend against using it for that purpose. Google said that they’ve put in some preventative measures so that rel=”nofollow” links sort of do this leaking PageRank thing, as they call it. I wouldn’t stress too much about that, but I certainly wouldn’t use rel=”nofollow.”

What I would do is if I’m trying to do internal link sculpting, I would just do careful curation of the links and pages that I’ve got. That is the best way to help your internal link flow. That’s things like…

V. Removing low-value content, low-engagement content and creating internal links that people actually do want. That is going to give you the best results.

VI. Don’t orphan! Make sure pages that matter have links to (and from) them. Last, but not least, there should never be an orphan. There should never be a page with no links to it, and certainly there should never be a page that is well linked to that isn’t linking back out to portions of your site that are of interest or value to visitors and to Google.

So following these practices, I think you can do some awesome internal link analysis, internal link optimization and help your SEO efforts and the value visitors get from your site. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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We want to be able to answer questions about why one page outranks another.

“What would we have to do to outrank that site?”

“Why is our competitor outranking us on this search?”

These kind of questions — from bosses, from clients, and from prospective clients — are a standard part of day-to-day life for many SEOs. I know I’ve been asked both in the last week.

It’s relatively easy to figure out ways that a page can be made more relevant and compelling for a given search, and it’s straightforward to think of ways the page or site could be more authoritative (even if it’s less straight-forward to get it done). But will those changes or that extra link cause an actual reordering of a specific ranking? That’s a very hard question to answer with a high degree of certainty.

When we asked a few hundred people to pick which of two pages would rank better for a range of keywords, the average accuracy on UK SERPs was 46%. That’s worse than you’d get if you just flipped a coin! This chart shows the performance by keyword. It’s pretty abysmal:

While I remain confident when building strategies to increase overall organic visibility, traffic, and revenue, I’m less sure than ever which individual ranking factors will outweigh which others in a specific case.

The strategic approach looks at whole sites and groups of keywords

My approach is generally to zoom out and build business cases on assumptions about portfolios of rankings, but it’s been on my mind recently as I think about the ways machine learning should make Google rankings ever more of a black box, and cause the ranking factors to vary more and more between niches.

In general, “why does this page rank?” is the same as “which of these two pages will rank better?”

I’ve been teaching myself about deep neural networks using TensorFlow and Keras — an area I’m pretty sure I’d have ended up studying and working in if I’d gone to college 5 years later. As I did so, I started thinking about how you would model a SERP (which is a set of high-dimensional non-linear relationships). I realized that the litmus test of understanding ranking factors — and thus being able to answer “why does that page outrank us?” — boils down to being able to answer a simpler question:

Given two pages, can you figure out which one will outrank the other for a given query?

If you can answer that in the general case, then you know why one page outranks another, and vice-versa.

It turns out that people are terrible at answering this question.

I thought that answering this with greater accuracy than a coin flip was going to be a pretty low bar. As you saw from the sneak peak of my results above, that turned out not to be the case. Reckon you can do better? Skip ahead to take the test and find out.

(In fact, if you could find a way to test this effectively, I wonder if it would make a good qualifying question for the next moz ranking factors survey. Should you only listen only to the opinion of those experts who are capable of answering with reasonable accuracy? Note that my test that follows isn’t at all rigorous because you can cheat by Googling the keywords — it’s just for entertainment purposes).

Take the test and see how well you can answer

With my curiosity piqued, I put together a simple test, thinking it would be interesting to see how good expert SEOs actually are at this, as well as to see how well laypeople do.

I’ve included a bit more about the methodology and some early results below, but if you’d like to skip ahead and test yourself you can go ahead here.

Note that to simplify the adversarial side, I’m going to let you rely on all of Google’s spam filtering — you can trust that every URL ranks in the top 10 for its example keyword — so you’re choosing an ordering of two pages that do rank for the query rather than two pages from potentially any domain on the Internet.

I haven’t designed this to be uncheatable — you can obviously cheat by Googling the keywords — but as my old teachers used to say: “If you do, you’ll only be cheating yourself.”

Unfortunately, Google Forms seems to have removed the option to be emailed your own answers outside of an apps domain, so if you want to know how you did, note down your answers as you go along and compare them to the correct answers (which are linked from the final page of the test).

You can try your hand with just one keyword or keep going, trying anywhere up to 10 keywords (each with a pair of pages to put in order). Note that you don’t need to do all of them; you can submit after any number.

You can take the survey either for the US (google.com) or UK (google.co.uk). All results are considering only the “blue links” results — i.e. links to web pages — rather than universal search results / one-boxes etc.

What do the early responses show?

Before publishing this post, we sent it out to the @distilled and @moz networks. At the time of writing, almost 300 people have taken the test, and there are already some interesting results:

It seems as though the US questions are slightly easier

The UK test appears to be a little harder (judging both by the accuracy of laypeople, and with a subjective eye). And while accuracy generally increases with experience in both the UK and the US, the vast majority of UK respondents performed worse than a coin flip:

Some easy questions might skew the data in the US

Digging into the data, there are a few of the US questions that are absolute no-brainers (e.g. there’s a question about the keyword [mortgage calculator] in the US that 84% of respondents get right regardless of their experience). In comparison, the easiest one in the UK was also a mortgage-related query ([mortgage comparisons]) but only 2/3 of people got that right (67%).

Compare the UK results by keyword…

…To the same chart for the US keywords:

So, even though the overall accuracy was a little above 50% in the US (around 56% or roughly 5/9), I’m not actually convinced that US SERPs are generally easier to understand. I think there are a lot of US SERPs where human accuracy is in the 40% range.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is on display

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a well-studied psychological phenomenon whereby people “fail to adequately assess their level of competence,” typically feeling unsure in areas where they are actually strong (impostor syndrome) and overconfident in areas where they are weak. Alongside the raw predictions, I asked respondents to give their confidence in their rankings for each URL pair on a scale from 1 (“Essentially a guess, but I’ve picked the one I think”) to 5 (“I’m sure my chosen page should rank better”).

The effect was most pronounced on the UK SERPs — where respondents answering that they were sure or fairly sure (4–5) were almost as likely to be wrong as those guessing (1) — and almost four percentage points worse than those who said they were unsure (2–3):

Is Google getting some of these wrong?

The question I asked SEOs was “which page do you think ranks better?”, not “which page is a better result?”, so in general, most of the results say very little about whether Google is picking the right result in terms of user satisfaction. I did, however, ask people to share the survey with their non-SEO friends and ask them to answer the latter question.

If I had a large enough sample-size, you might expect to see some correlation here — but remember that these were a diverse array of queries and the average respondent might well not be in the target market, so it’s perfectly possible that Google knows what a good result looks like better than they do.

Having said that, in my own opinion, there are one or two of these results that are clearly wrong in UX terms, and it might be interesting to analyze why the “wrong” page is ranking better. Maybe that’ll be a topic for a follow-up post. If you want to dig into it, there’s enough data in both the post above and the answers given at the end of the survey to find the ones I mean (I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t tried it out yet). Let me know if you dive into the ranking factors and come up with any theories.

There is hope for our ability to fight machine learning with machine learning

One of the disappointments of putting together this test was that by the time I’d made the Google Form I knew too many of the answer to be able to test myself fairly. But I was comforted by the fact that I could do the next best thing — I could test my neural network (well, my model, refactored by our R&D team and trained on data they gathered, which we flippantly called Deeprank).

I think this is fair; the instructions did say “use whatever tools you like to assess the sites, but please don’t skew the results by performing the queries on Google yourself.” The neural network wasn’t trained on these results, so I think that’s within the rules. I ran it on the UK questions because it was trained on google.co.uk SERPs, and it did better than a coin flip:

So maybe there is hope that smarter tools could help us continue to answer questions like “why is our competitor outranking us on this search?”, even as Google’s black box gets ever more complex and impenetrable.

If you want to hear more about these results as I gather more data and get updates on Deeprank when it’s ready for prime-time, be sure to add your email address when you:

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Let’s face it: SEO isn’t as black & white as most marketing channels. In my opinion, to become a true professional requires a broad skill set. It’s not that a professional SEO needs to know the answer for everything; rather, it’s more important to have the skills to be able to find the answer.

I’m really pleased with the results of various bits of training I’ve put together for successful juniors over the years, so I think it’s time to share.

This is a Junior SEO task list designed to help new starters in the field get the right skills by doing hands-on jobs, and possibly to help find a specialism in SEO or digital marketing.

Project 1 – Technical Fundamentals:

Master the lingo and have a decent idea of how the Internet works before they start having conversations with developers or contributing online. Have the trainee answer the following questions. To demonstrate that they understand, have them answer the questions using analogies. Takeinspiration from this post.

Link architecture

Explain its efficiency from an SEO perspective — are this website’s pages linked efficiently? Why or why not?

Project 2 – Creating a (minimum) 10-page website

If the trainee doesn’t understand what something is, make sure that they try and figure it out themselves before coming for help. Building a website by hand is absolutely painful, and they might want to throw their computer out the window or just install WordPress — no, no, no. There are so many things to learn by doing it the hard way, which is the only way.

Grab a domain name and go setup shared hosting. A LAMP stack with Cpanel and log file access (example: hostgator) is probably the easiest.

Set up Filezilla with your host’s FTP details

Set up a text editor (example: Notepad++, Sublime) and connect via FTP for quick deploy

Create a 10-page flat site (NO CMS. That means no WordPress!)

Within the site, it must contain at least one instance of each the following:

Create a canonical to an exact duplicate, and another to a unique page — watch behavior

The site must contain at least one instance of each of the following, and every page which contains a directive (accompanying pages affected by directives as well) must be tracked through a rank tracker:

Rel canonical

Noindex

Noindex, follow

Mobile alternate (one page must be mobile-friendly)

Noarchive

Noimageindex

Meta refresh

Set up rank tracking

The trainee can use whatever tracking tool they like; https://www.wincher.com/ is $ 6/month for 100 keywords. The purpose of the rank tracking is to measure the effects of directives implemented, redirects, and general fluctuation.

Create the following XML sitemaps:

Write the following XML sitemaps by hand for at least 5 URLs: mobile, desktop, Android App, and create one desktop XML sitemap with hreflang annotations

Figure out how to ping Google & Bing with your sitemap URL

Writing robots.txt

Design a robots.txt that has specific blocking conditions for regular Googlebot, Bingbot, all user agents. They must be independent and not interfere with each other.

Write a rule that disallows everything, but allows at least 1 folder.

Test the robots.txt file through the Search Console robots.txt tester.

Project 3 – PR, Sales, Promotion and Community Involvement

These tasks can be done on an independent website or directly for a client; it depends on your organizational requirements. This is the part of the training where the trainee learns how to negotiate, sell, listen, promote, and create exposure for themselves.

Sales & negotiation

Close one guest post deal (i.e. have your content placed on an external website). Bonus if this is done via a phone call.

Create & close one syndication deal (i.e. have your content placed and rel canonical’d back to your content). Bonus if this is done via a phone call.

Close one advertising deal (this could be as simple as negotiating a banner placement, and as hard as completely managing the development of the ad plus tracking)

Sit in on 5 sales calls (depending on your business, this may need to be adjusted — it could be customer service calls)

Sit in on 5 sales meetings (again, adjust this for your business)

PR

Create a story, write a press release, get the story covered by any publication (bonus if there’s a link back to your original release, or a rel canonical)

Adwords

Bonus: Drive 100 visits with an ad. Remember to keep the costs low — this is just training!

Project 4 – Data Manipulation & Analytics

Spreadsheets are to SEOs as fire trucks are to firefighters. Trainees need to be proficient in Excel or Google Docs right from the start. These tasks are useful for grasping data manipulation techniques in spreadsheets, Google Analytics, and some more advanced subjects, like scraping and machine learning classification.

Excel skills

Must be able to fill in required arguments for the following formulas in under 6 seconds:

Index + match

VLOOKUP (we should really be teaching people to index-match, because it’s more versatile and is quicker when dealing with larger datasets)

Install the Google Tag Assistant for Chrome and learn to record and decipher requests for debugging

Use the Google Analytics Query explorer to pull from any profile — you must pull at least 3 metrics, 1 dimension, sort by 1 metric, and have 1 filter.

Create one Google Content Experiment — this involves creating two pages and A/B testing to find the winner. They’ll need to have some sort of call to action; it could be as simple as a form or a targeted click. Either way, traffic doesn’t determine the winner here; it’s conversion rate.

Google Search Console

Trainee must go through every report (I really mean every report), and double-check the accuracy of each using external SEO tools (except crawl activity reports). The point here is to find out why there are discrepancies between what SEO tools find and what Google Search Console reports.

Fetch and render 5 different pages from 5 domains, include at least 2 mobile pages

Fetch (only fetch) 3 more pages; 1 must be mobile

Submit an XML sitemap

Create https, http, www, and non-www versions of their site they built in the previous project and identify discrepancies.

Link auditing

Download link reports for 1 website. Use Google Search Console, Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz, and combine them all in one Excel file (or Google Doc sheet). If the total number of rows between all 4 exports are over Excel’s limit, the trainee will need to figure out how to handle large files on their own (hint: SQL or other database).

Must combine all links, de-duplicate, have columns for all anchor texts, and check if links are still alive (hint: the trainee can use Screaming Frog to check live links, or URL Profiler)

Scrape something

Use at least 3 different methods to extract information from any webpage (hint: import.io, importxml)

Log file analysis

Let the trainee use whatever software they want to parse the log files; just remember to explain how different servers will have different fields.

Grab a copy of any web server access log files that contain at least the following fields: user-agent, timestamp, URI, IP, Method, Referrer (ensure that CDNs or other intermediary transactions are not rewriting the IP addresses).

Manipulate elements of the page (As a fun exercise, get them to change a news article to a completely new story)

Find every request Chrome makes when visiting a webpage

Download the HAR file

Run a speed audit & security audit directly from the development tool interface

Change their user agent to Googlebot

Emulate an Apple iPhone 5

Add a CSS attribute (or change one)

Add a breakpoint

Use the shortcut key to bring up development tools

Project 5 – Miscellaneous / Fun Stuff

These projects are designed to broaden their skills, as well as as prepare the trainee for the future and introduce them to important concepts.

Use a proxy and a VPN

As long as they are able to connect to a proxy and a VPN in any application, this is fine — ensure that they understand how to verify their new IP.

Find a development team, and observe the development cycle

Have the trainees be present during a scrum/sprint kickoff, and a release.

Have the trainees help write development tickets and prioritize accordingly.

Have them spend a day helping other employees with different jobs

Have them spend a day with the PR, analytics folks, devs… everyone. The goal should be to understand what it’s like to live a day in their shoes, and assist them throughout the entire day.

Get a website THEY OWN penalized. Heck, make it two!

Now that the trainee has built a website by hand, feel free to get them to put up another couple of websites and get some traffic pouring in.

Then, start searching for nasty links and other deceptive SEO tactics that are against the Webmaster Guidelines and get that website penalized. Hint: Head to fiverr.com for some services.

Bonus: Try to get the penalty reversed. Heh, good luck

API skills

Request data from 2 different APIs using at least 2 different technologies (either a programming language or software — I would suggest the SEMrush APIand Alchemy Language API). Hints: They can use Postman, Google Docs, Excel, command line, or any programming language.

Learn concepts of programming

Write 2 functions in 2 different programming languages — these need to be functions that do something useful (i.e. “hello world” is not useful).

Ideas:

A Javascript bookmark that extracts link metrics from Majestic or Moz for the given page

A simple application that extracts title, H1, and all links from a given URL

A simple application that emails you if a change has been detected on a webpage

Pull word count from 100 pages in less than 10 seconds

If I were to pick which technology, it would be Javascript and Python. Javascript (Node, Express, React, Angular, Ember, etc.) because I believe things are moving this way, i.e. 1 language for both front and back end. Python because of its rich data science & machine learning libraries, which may become a core part of SEO tasks in the future.

Do an introductory course on computer science / build a search engine

I strongly recommend anyone in SEO to build their own search engine — and no, I’m not crazy, this isn’t crazy, it’s just hard. There are two ways to do this, but I’d recommend both.

Sign up to https://opensolr.com/, crawl a small website, and build your own search engine. You’ll go through a lot of pain to configure what you want, but you’ll learn all about Apache Solr and how a popular search technology works.

Super Evil Genius Bonus Training

Get them to pass http://oap.ninja/, built by the infamous Dean Cruddace. Warning, this is evil — I’ve seen seasoned SEOs give up after just hours into it.

These days, SEO job requirements demand a lot from candidates.

Employers are asking for a wider array of skills that range from development to design as standard, not “preferred.”

Have a look around at current SEO job listings. You might be surprised just how much we’re expected to know these days:

Strong in Google Analytics/Omniture

Assist in the development of presentations to clients

Advanced proficiency with MS Excel, SQL

Advanced writing, grammar, spelling, editing, and English skills with a creative flair

The list goes on and on, but you get the point. We’re expected to be developers, designers, PR specialists, salespeople, CRO, and social managers. This is why I believe we need to expose juniors to a wide set of tasks and help them develop a broad skill set.

“I’m a Junior SEO and my boss is making me do this training now, I hate you Dave!”

You might hate me now, but when you’re making a lot more money you might change your mind (you might even want to cuddle).

Plus, I’m putting you through hell so that….

You don’t lose credibility in front of developers (hint: these are the people who will have to implement your consulting). By using the correct terminology, and by doing parts of the work, you’ll be able to empathize and give better advice.

You don’t limit yourself to specific projects/tasks because of lack of knowledge/experience in other specialisms within SEO.

You will become a well-rounded marketer, able to take on whatever Google’s Algorithm of Wonder throws at you or jump into other disciplines within digital marketing with a solid foundation.

Feel free to ping me on Twitter (@dsottimano) or you can catch me hanging out with the DMG crew.

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